(1)
As an undergraduate at Pennsylvania, Chomsky studied philosophy and
mathematics.

(2)
From 1951-55, Chomsky (while at Harvard) developed friendships with Goodman,
Quine, Scheffler, Bar-Hillel, and Putnam. The first four are mentioned by
Chomsky in the preface to Syntactic
Structures.

(3)
In 1960, Chomsky attracted Fodor and Katz (both then at Princeton) to come to
MIT. They formed the philosophical point, as it were, of the generative
enterprise, although Fodor was involved in some interesting empirical work -
e.g., the ‘click’ experiments - and Katz was an accomplished syntactician. Both
significantly departed from Chomsky in the 1970s/80s. Chomsky has often
highlighted this split. Many philosophers, though, persist in reading Chomsky
through Fodor.

(4)
Over the years, Chomsky has responded (mostly in detail) to the following contemporary
philosophers:

“Perhaps
one might argue that recent semantic theories supersede the intuitions of Wittgenstein…
because of their Explanatory success. That does not, however, seem a promising
idea; explanatory success will hardly bear that burden. In general, we have
little reason now to believe that more than a Wittgensteinian assembly of
particulars lies beyond the domain of internalist inquiry [JC: basically,
syntax].

—
‘Explaining Language Use’ (1992). In New
Horizons in the Study of Language andMind,
2001, p.45.

“As
for semantics, insofar as we understand language use, the argument for a
reference-based semantics seems to me weak. It is possible that natural
language… has a “semantics” only in the sense of “the study of how this
instrument, whose formal structure and potentialities of expression are the
subject of syntactic investigation, is actually put to use in a speech community,”
to quote from the earliest formulation in generative grammar 40 years ago,
influenced by Wittgenstein, Austin and others.” [The quotation is from Syntactic Structures (1957).]

—
‘Language as a Natural Object’ (1994). In New
Horizons in the Study of Language andMind,
2001, p.132.

“[F]actual
beliefs and common-sense expectations also play a role in determining that a
thing is categorizable and hence namable. Consider Wittgenstein’s disappearing
chair. In his terms, we have no “rules saying whether one may use the word ‘chair’
to include this kind of thing” [PI, p.38, as Noam quaintly references it]. Or
to put it differently, we keep certain factual assumptions about the behaviour
of objects fixed when we categorize them and thus take them as eligible for
naming or description.”

—
Reflections on Language, 1975, p.45.

Chomsky’s
Attitude to Philosophy

Chomsky
not only appeals to the ‘rationalist’ tradition, he also shares their
conception of philosophy being simply a more a more foundational aspect of
inquiry, not essentially separable from what we would think of as empirical
inquiry:

(1)
“Philosophy is a somewhat artificial discipline. It didn’t really exist until
fairly recently. Until about the 19th century, there was no real difference
between science and philosophy. It’s not clear that the distinction makes
sense. I don’t have any philosophical view, and I don’t think there are such
views. I think we ought to try to understand the world, understand ourselves,
society, and do it by whatever methods there are… Physics has been changing to
accommodate new phenomena. But either you succeed or you fail. If you fail
you’ve got problems. If you succeed, it’s part of physics. I don’t see any
other question”.

By
no means, though, does Chomsky see
science as offering an account of ‘everything’. Science progresses along quite
narrow paths, perhaps for essential reasons:

(3)
“Plainly, such an approach [as articulated above] does not exclude other ways
of trying to comprehend the world. Someone committed to it (as I am) can
consistently believe (as I do) that we learn much more of human interest about
how people think and feel and act by reading novels or studying history than
from all of naturalistic psychology, and perhaps always will; similarly, the
arts may offer appreciation of the heavens to which astrophysics cannot aspire.
We are here speaking of theoretical understanding, a particular mode of
comprehension. In this domain, any departure from a naturalistic approach
carries a burden of justification. Perhaps one can be given, but I know of
none. Departures from this naturalistic approach are not uncommon, including,
in my opinion, much of the most reflective and considered work in the
philosophy of language and mind, a fact that merits some thought, if true”.

—
Language and Thought,1993, p.42.

Equally,
Chomsky doesn’t have a technocratic understanding of science. Before we are
scientists, we are humans; we should be sensitive to the social and political impact
of our theorising:

“A
scientist, like anyone else, is responsible for the foreseeable consequences of
his acts… The scientist who undertakes this inquiry [into race and IQ] must therefore
show that its significance is so great as to outweigh its costs… [In fact], the
inquiry has no scientific significance and no social significance, apart from the
racist assumption that individuals must be regarded not as what they are but
rather as standing at the mean of their race category, it follows that it has
no merit at all…What we do as scientists, as scholars, as advocates, has
consequences, just as our refusal to speak or act has definite consequences. We
cannot escape this condition in a society based on concentration of power and
privilege… We may and should recommend the simple virtues: honesty and truthfulness,
responsibility and concern. But to live by these precepts is often no simple matter.”

(3)
Rejection of reductionism as a misunderstanding of scientific methodology.

Lower
level sciences typically have to be modified to accommodate higher theories.

(4)
Rejection of the problem of intentionality.

There
is no conceptually independent description of what mental states are supposed
to be about.

(5)
Rejection of functionalism in the philosophy of mind.

There
is no a priori or empirical reason to
want or expect a theory of mentality as such.

(6)
Rejection of all would be substantial claims that language is forX.

Language
is ‘for’ whatever we can make of it; there is nothing about the mathematical structure
of language which makes it appear to be designed for one particular thing or
another, and all the uses of language appear not to be reducible to, or
explicable in terms of, just the one or a few.

(7)
Rejection ofrepresentation as
re-presentation in regards to both mind and language.

External
relations may or may not be germane to an understanding of linguistic
structure, but there is no clear sense in which the structures carry
information about external relata.

(8)
Rejection of indeterminacy proposals.

One
should approach above the neck phenomena with the same methodology as applies
below the neck. Indeterminacy is just familiar underdetermination.

(9)
Clear separation ofcolloquial concepts
from scientific ones.

Science
invents its own concepts; science doesn’t discover essences, not of water, mountains,
beliefs, or meanings. In particular, there is no prospect of a science of mind
or language that will reduce or eliminate our ‘ethno’ understanding.

(10)
Rejection of non-theoretical ontological questions.

Outside
of narrow theoretical avenues, there is no ‘interest-independent’ inquiry into
how the world is.

(11)
Rejection of all claims that language acquisition is a matter of
training/teaching.

Such
claims are empirically false.

(12)
Rejection of ‘theories’ of meaning or content.

The
notions are colloquial and nebulous; there is no a priori or empirical demand
to have a theory of such ‘things’.

(13)
Rejection of all abstract/Platonist understandings of language and thought.

Essentially
incapable of entering into a theory of acquisition.

(14)
Rejection of causal explanations of behaviour or mental states.

There
is no clear sense in which behaviour/mental states have causal antecedents.
No-one has yet to imagine even an adequate science in this area.

(15)
Separation of language from the ‘use’ of language.

Language
is a commonsense term. For theoretical purposes, we target the mathematical
structure that is realised in the human mind/brain - call this I-language.

(16)
Rejection of all analogies between language and X.

Analogies
are not explanatory. Aspects of language might be like football. Other aspects
are like snowflakes. So what?

(17)
Rejection of propositional knowledge of language.

The
speaker/hearer knows a language to the extent that she is able to speak and
understand in a systematic way. A theory may target the structure that enables
such systematicity, but there is no a priori reason to think that the structure
will be propositional. To think otherwise is to read the colloquial idioms of
our ‘ethno’ concepts into the posits of the scientific theory.

(18)
Rejection of the autonomy of meaning.

Sentences
and words don’t carry their full ‘meanings’ with them. Meaning is inseparable
from matters of fact, belief, and context. However, aspects of ‘meaningfulness’
are at least determined by linguistic structure, which has no observable
correlates.

(19)
Rejection of psychological reality.

Linguistic
structures are psychologically real in no greater sense than their being posited
by successful theories of the mind/brain.

(20)
Rejection of ‘rules’ as constitutive of linguistic understanding.

There
are rules to the extent that they enter into a theoretical understanding of
linguistic capacity. This doesn’t seem to be the case.

Correctness
is a normative, social notion, which has no role to play in the determination
of linguistic competence.

It
will be noted that these views are all negative. Chomsky has no philosophical views beyond those
views articulated in his detailed work in linguistics and their consequences,
and the working methodological assumptions which govern that work.

Chomsky’s
nativism and internalism are not
philosophical views. They are metatheoretical hypotheses that are confirmed to
the extent that the object-level theories remain progressive. As a point of
fact, no explanatory theory in the
area of language or mind has met with any success which has rejected nativism
and internalism.

Chomsky’s
‘Tactics’ with the Philosophers

Chomsky
has four general tactics against his philosophical interlocutors.

(1)
Expose the false empirical assumptions in the work of the philosopher.

The
list here is vast, and tends to include any philosophy who talks about
training, encultureation, teaching, word learning, triangulation, context,
feedback, dispositions…

(2)
Confrontation of a priori claims about
language with syntactic results.

(3)
Deconstruction, as it were.

This
is employed against those who see a departure from common idiom as signaling a
conceptual howler. Chomsky points out that they themselves are departing from
common idiom in an effort to save a piece of high metaphysics to do, say, with
the publicity of meaning or language being a capacity. Kenny, Dummett,
Strawson, Lear and others fall victim.

(4)
Ignorance

With
a few notable exceptions (Soames, and, to an extent, Harman, Putnam and Stich),
Chomsky’s philosophical interlocutors have not concerned themselves with linguistic
theory, still less psycholinguistics. Chomsky, however, has always made clear
that his apparent philosophical views are wholly parasitic on theoretical work
done by him and others. The results are less than flattering for philosophy. Things
have improved, but not greatly, Fiona Cowie’s recent book length attack on
Chomsky - What’s Within (1999) - is
marked throughout by fundamental ignorance and confusion, and a lack of basic
intellectual integrity. A more recent book by Jesse Prinz - Furnishingthe Mind (2003) - affects to be technically sophisticated but makes
elementary errors at every turn.

It remains easy to find supposedly
cutting edge works of philosophy of language which are premised on claims that
have been known to be false for
decades - a particularly egregious example is Brandom’s Making It Explicit.

Chomsky doesn’t think that philosophy of
language should become linguistics. Chomsky’s praise for Austin and
Wittgenstein is precisely based on the thought that in the area of meaning, it
is more important to have a clear conception of the phenomena, than to develop
theories which are transparently inadequate. See quotations above.

There’s
No Such Thing as ‘Chomskyanism’

Chomsky
has always fiercely rejected the personalisation of linguistics around himself.
We don’t talk of ‘Einsteinianism’. Personalisation is a mark of organised
religion, not intellectual inquiry. It exists where there are no results.

No-one
in linguistics talks of ‘Chomskyanism’, and for good reason. Most of generative
linguistics doesn’t originate with Chomsky. For example,

Deep
Structure - Katz and Postal

Movement
conditions - Ross

C-command
- Reinhart

Parametric
conditions - Rizzi

Phrase
structure elimination - Lasnik/Stowell

LF
movement - May

Little
v - Hale/Keyser

Arg
heads - Kayne/Pollock

Level
free architecture - Uriagereka/Epstein

Still…

Chomsky’s
influence on philosophy has been as great as any one’s of the past 50 years. In
the 1960s, empiricism, behaviourism and off the shelf ‘Wittgensteinianism’
reigned. That such views are now largely considered absurd is due mostly to
Chomsky. Unfortunately, a new set of doctrines dominate: functionalism, causal
theories of content and behaviour, truth conditional theories of meaning, etc.

Some
Nice Things Said about Chomsky

“Chomsky’s
work is one of the most remarkable intellectual achievements of the present
era… In the long run, I believe [Chomsky’s] greatest contribution will be that
he has taken a major step toward restoring the traditional conception of the
dignity and uniqueness of man”.

—
John Searle, ‘Chomsky’s Revolution in Linguistics’ (1972)

“Philosophers
have much admired him [Chomsky] but have also criticized some features of his
work. Here he examines their arguments. It is like watching the grand master
play, blindfolded, thirty-six simultaneous chess matches against the local
worthies. He almost always wins.”

—
Ian Hacking, ‘Chomsky and his Critics’ (1980)

“Noam is, of course, a major philosopher and a
great linguist… In the end… I think Noam Chomsky is right in making his
rejoinder to Quine’s claims.”

“He
[Chomsky] cannot be charged with lack of diligence in the study and
assimilation, when relevant, of the work of mathematicians, scientists and
philosophers available to him, or with not having tried to stand on their
shoulders whenever possible. Regretfully, some philosophers, like some of their
fellow scientists, particularly biologists, have yet to study and assimilate
his groundbreaking discoveries. The price has been high in embarrassment.”

—
Akeel Bilgrami, in Chomsky, Language and
Thought, 1993, p.58-9.

“Not
many scientists are great scientists, and not many great scientists get to
found a whole new field, but there are a few. Charles Darwin is one; Noam
Chomsky is yet another… In 1960, my sophomore year at Harvard, I asked Quine
what critics of his views I should be reading. He immediately suggested that I
should look at the work of Noam Chomsky”.

—
Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
(1995)

“One
would therefore expect that any philosopher of mind or language would make it
his or her business to understand the basic methodology and some of the results
of this subject. But many philosophers of mind and language proceed in utter
ignorance of the subject.”

—
Gilbert Harman, Review of Chomsky, New
Horizons in the Study of Language andMind
2001.